


Days of Rain

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-18
Updated: 2008-02-18
Packaged: 2017-10-03 07:18:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was Heisenberg's uncertainty: Mulder's skeptical disciple, a professional woman in love, a barren mother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Days of Rain

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: S7  
> A/N: Title is from a W.S. Merwin poem, which you can find [here](http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/anniversary/anniversary.html). Looking back, I see how much this was inspired by Penumbra's [Parabiosis](http://underthewing.com/penumbra/para.html) \- sorry, Pen, it wasn't intentional!  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this and no infringement is intended.

Dana Scully thought a lot about death these days. She considered her own death-to-be, the near miss of the thing several times already, and the awful inevitable death-to-be of Mulder. She weighed the lives she had saved against the lives she had taken and found the sum impossible. Mulder had recently given her a photocopy of a W.S. Merwin poem he had quoted to her some dark early stakeout when he still worked to irritate her and generally managed instead to pique her interest. She tagged the page onto her refrigerator with a magnet that said Graceland which had languished in her kitchen drawer since Mulder had bought it for her.

She looked at the poem over the steam-fogged rim of her morning coffee and thought about magnetism and the forces that unified the universe. She and Mulder moved on erratic similar orbits around the indescribable centerpoint of their partnership: a singularity of layered emotion and experience so dense it defied conversation, pulling their unspoken words from the inner sanctum behind their teeth in the way a black hole devoured light. Scully had learned to keep away from the event horizon but these days Mulder walked the edge of the Schwartzchild radius and bent the shape and tone of things.

She was fortunate in Mulder and his all or nothing heart. At the height of her anger she still realized the scope of him, the responsibility and the blessing of him. He was settling down, had found a sort of culminating grace in the retirement of his grief for his lost sister, and the tragedy had gone out of him. She watched him with quiet relief. His fallow heart was waking, put under the plow edge of his quickening mind. He was turning things over and she watched and accepted his frequent invitations to watch a movie or get a meal somewhere, casual end of day outings. On the way home from his apartment nights, she thought about love, about life and where it had put her.

There was sex, too: she thought about sex. The air conditioning and heating in the basement had gone inexplicably erratic, an X-File of appliance malfunction. She and Mulder discarded jackets and studiously ignored the plummeting v's of skin as the day went on and buttons surrendered. Scully thought of the open neck of Mulder's shirt as a garden of earthly delights: damned if she did touch and taste the faint saltcrystal gleam of the delicate skin between throat and sternum, distracted if she didn't. There were moments when only the certain knowledge of surveillance kept her from twisting her fingers into the fine cotton of his shirt and pulling him bodily against her. Her body was suffused with the expansive urge to open but her fashionable sexy clothes and her resolve constricted her hips like a chastity belt and she fidgeted in her chair.

The space-heater effect of computers and gadgetry helped the heat and bother. They had set up fans thieved from their apartments, carrying them in each morning like infants for a creche. Scully wanted to shift her knees against the fan by her desk to feel the breeze against the heated insides of her thighs, but she fretted that Mulder would discern her arousal even without an aromatic hint. He had an uncanny habit of knowing everything about her. The office smelled enough like sex to begin with, a base note of light sweat overlaid by the elegant grace notes of colognes and perfumes touched at the bases of throats unexpectedly warm. Scully made a habit of long swims over her lunch hour, and scented the office with salad dressings instead of desire as she read over cases with her mouth full of greens.

She saw the infinite possibilities that lay before this light-hearted Mulder who must have existed before. When he had been a boy, the world had been a constant newness of opportunity. His life was as fecund as hers was not. She felt the limits of her myopic life and was strangely mostly content to spend the greater part of her time observing Mulder recenter himself. She collected pointless data: a new tie, a brightness in his eye when he looked at her. Over the bold facings of her monitor she watched him watching her and was pleased by the symmetry.

A baby: the impossible core of her longings, but Mulder gave her hope. Asking him to take such a share in her life terrified her. She knew it was a half-measure but still more than she'd ever granted him or anyone and she hoped he could see that. Waiting for his answer was worse than the slow death of cancer.

But he said yes.

She found herself examining his features, half-hoping that the genes that produced his outsize nose bred true. When he had a cold, his exhalations into tissues were like a seventh grader's tuba blasts; when she had a cold he teased her about the volumes of mucus that came from her fluted goyische nostrils. She wanted her child to draw deep breaths of life and sneeze with gusto. Everywhere she caught herself dreaming of a daughter with Mulder's pout or a son with elfin ears.

He took her to the Spy Museum one weekend and kissed her beside a display of binoculars and still the world didn't end, though they pretended nothing had happened.

Here was the difference between them: Scully still knocked before she came into Mulder's apartment, while on the infrequent occasions they met at her apartment she always came in to find him curled up on the couch, flicking idly through the television channels. Mulder didn't think of anyone else's space, blithely disregarding posted no trespassing and enter both. Scully was still conscious of the boundaries and proximities that didn't even cross Mulder's mind. She always knew where Mulder was in relation to herself. He had made himself at home with her, taken her into his confidence and his life when she had run to him keen with the frightening notion of her death by his strange hypotheses and flung off her bathrobe in their first pair of hotel rooms. When they closed the X-Files she had left her foot wedged in the door of Mulder's heart, strung along by a sense of unwrought justice, Irish stubbornness, and the fascinating delicacy of the fine bones of his wrists and hands.

She loved him because he drove her crazy, because he was everything, because of his boundless faith and his pain. She had learned the middle way with him, the calibration of a balance point in a mad world. She was Heisenberg's uncertainty: Mulder's skeptical disciple, a professional woman in love, a barren mother.

They were parents, siblings, children to each other, and they walked alone in a twisted world, solitary in solidarity.

She took him home for Easter to make amends for her sojourn with CGB Spender, a way to show him what she'd wanted to save aside from Mulder's own beloved bristly violated head. He refused the ham politely and charmed Tara by healing Matthew's boo-boo with a Batman bandaid after her nephew skinned his knee in the driveway. Her small fierce mother adored Mulder in spite of Bill and the weight of Mulder's sins. Mrs. Scully brought out leftover pot roast for Mulder and glared Bill back into sullen adolescence. Scully watched Mulder sprawl on her mother's rug to stack blocks with Matt and smiled. They built the Great Pyramid without help from aliens and Mulder said he'd do the dishes and Scully kissed him in the kitchen while soap bubbles clotted on his lean forearms.

Mulder had just enough of the bad boy touch: his porn tapes added a dimension of rebellion to his jockish dork allure and he tasted better than the cigarettes she'd filched in the dark of the porch. She kissed him again and caught his bottom lip briefly between her teeth, and then broke away at her mother's calculatedly noisy approach and rinsed the dishes with a flush high on her cheekbones like an over-rouged schoolgirl.

She liked Mulder's porn collection. It gave her a pleasant idea of his sex drive and a notion that he'd be willing enough to swap for the real thing. She liked his apartment with its historied couch. In her tidy rooms Mulder was an exaggeration of masculinity, leanly muscled and cologne fragrant, and it made her want to take him to her well-tended overlarge bed. It was dangerous. He managed to move like he belonged there and like he was afraid of breaking something, and she wanted to say, no please do, but couldn't.

By contrast, his apartment was organic and unstructured the way his mind was, furnished intuitively. She felt comfortable there with her feet on his coffee table among the slippery photos and manila folders, and her thoughts tangled in his as they continued their essential endless debate. The lighting was terrible and it felt like a space in which they could talk. Plus, she liked his fish.

She knocked on his door one unremarkable night and let herself in when there was no answer. Mulder padded out of his bathroom with his spiky hair damp and his mouth full of toothpaste. The toothbrush handle jutted from his mouth, adding an imperative note to the interrogation of his arched eyebrows, but she ignored both and stretched up to kiss him just under the overhang of his lip where there was only a suspicion of minty froth. She sat on the edge of the bed as he rinsed and spat with flabbergasted haste. Her shoes lay like husks on the floor, cousins to the million discarded sunflower shells in the ashtrays of innocuous rental cars, but she hung her jacket in his closet. Mulder sat next to her and she traced the map of his heart on his bare chest. He looked at her as if she were the first morning after the apocalypse, staggered with hope and reverence. She pressed the moist heat of her open mouth to the secret pulse in his neck and felt him tremble. They made love without speaking and the immensity of what they'd done, the indulgence after years of denial, drove her home to her own lonely bed before he woke.

In the morning after her shower she stood critically in front of the mirror. The sluice of her hair dripped onto her shoulders and beaded there. She cupped her breasts, pointless until now, still firm and high from good living and infrequent use. Her stomach was as flat as she could hope. She cared for her body the way she cared for her weapon: precisely, dispassionately, putting the right things into it and letting the right things out. Her cells had betrayed her before. Now she exercised with more spirit and regularity than she went to Mass and she kept herself lean and sleek, pleased by the solid infrastructure of bones under the tender flesh. She relied on her body but Mulder had cherished it. She saw her curves with new eyes.

Mulder came over in the evening with files to spread across her kitchen table. Consult work, he said. Scully tapped abberations in the evidence with one finger and Mulder stitched her half-notions into his improbably accurate tapestry of explanation and they grinned at the perfect form and funtion of their partnership. He kissed her, tentatively, and she let him lead her to the bedroom and sanctify the violated space of it with the touch of his beautiful hands. He talked softly to her and lit a candle and somehow she didn't mind. The small flame seemed to burn the lingering awful memories out of the air. She felt purified, exorcised. She felt safe. Mulder's fingers were magic.

She woke beside him and discovered she was happy.

Still on the nights they were at his place she left his apartment in the dark. She loved him in her space but didn't want him to feel cornered in his. Mulder's fight or flight was easy to trigger and the outcome was unpredictable. She could afford to take things slow. She liked their life the way it was, and she liked finding him in her bed in the mornings, and things were surprisingly easy.

Bill called to rag her about not bringing her gun this Christmas when she came after all Matt was getting to that curious age - she cut him off crisply, saying she didn't know her plans and it was still spring, Bill, so what's the rush? Bill spluttered and muttered that he thought that partner of hers was Jewish anyway. Scully hung up. Mulder was Jewish but they had cobbled together their own rituals over the years, a Christmas to satisfy themselves. They exchanged presents they'd promised not to buy this year like every year and they drank spiced wine to the hot wax smell of menorah candles reclaimed. Mulder didn't practice much but he liked the ritual of any theology, and he lit the candles like a prayer. Despite the warm air outside, Scully was washed with a sudden vision of waking up in Mulder's bed to snow on the windowsill, a tiny tree on his desk in the corner of the living room by the window where the masking tape used to be, and the only thing she wanted anymore with his warm graceful arm slung around the pillow.

She wanted to know everything about him these days, about the boy he'd been before his parents' crashing silence made his house a place without hope of sanctuary or asylum. She wanted to tell him all her girlhood dreams. But they sat instead in companionable silence or rehearsed their cyclical conversation, knowing that any anecdote would be somehow familiar, just a recognition. They did not talk of love or of their other lives before this. What else mattered but this? Memories were the butterfly's dream of the empty chrysalis, a necessary progression but little they wanted to salvage. Their basement had been a crucible and the extraneous miscellanies of childhood and adolescence had evaporated.

The baby was impossible. Her hope crumpled like rice paper and she drove home with the road warped perilously by the fisheye distortion of unshed tears. Mulder was waiting. He spent the whole weekend with her, making tea and calling for takeout and just holding her while she lay on the bed, exhausted by the effort of want. He didn't ask her about another try or some other option, just spent one breath on hope and she loved him for it, for the concerned words she could hear in his throat with each jagged swallow.

She lost interest in work. He couldn't draw her out of herself - he got frustrated and restless and she let him go to England. He wouldn't give up on her but she had given up on herself. The fruits of her rebellion hadn't compensated for the consequences of gratuitous deaths, of sisters lost and skulls and wombs breached. She had delivered the child of a hurricane mother but couldn't save her own daughter. She was insular, particular, faithless and faithful, barren as a winter field. She had saved lives but there was no joy in it. The FBI did not celebrate its victories or calculate hypothetical triumphs; she had no figures of lives saved, days improved, crimes thwarted. The only credit to her account was Mulder and she had seen him freed from his misery and dragged into her own.

Daniel had followed her. She found the idea astounding. It made her paranoid, one more stalker, one more face to see unexpectedly through her front window. He spoke to her of the woman she'd been with him and she thought: a reckless girl, a marriage wrecker. She had walked away because of her oath to do no harm. He didn't know about Marcus but he didn't know about the notches she could have in her pistol hilt either. Daniel berated her for sins of omission. Mulder had absolved her of her sins of commission, but this revived guilt subdued her until she spoke to Colleen at the strange intersection of their eerie parallel lives.

In the stillness of the Buddhist temple she found a vantage point on her freewheeling thoughts: she was thirty-six, childless and fatherless, living by making death surrender its truths, and she was beloved.

She touched her saviour and it was Mulder. She had left Daniel.

Mulder couldn't fathom the change in her so she made tea and on his couch she spun out the story of her life for him. At the end she fell asleep, dragged over the coals of her memories and too tired to participate in Mulder's analysis. Her leaden lids betrayed her and he carried her to bed later. They made love in the dark, whispering afterwards about the inadequate loves that had come before this. Mulder confessed the brief tenure of his marriage and Scully cried a little for the death of his idealism at the hands of Diana Fowley, who had redeemed herself but left a lasting mark. Mulder cried too and they tasted the salt of each other's tears through the blind comfort of kisses. Scully told him she hadn't slept with Ed Jerse and told him too that she'd wanted to, that she would have, that she'd gotten almost to everythingbut, but the interactions of alcohol and ergot had a soporific effect and she'd woken disoriented in the morning hoping to find Mulder beside her and been furious with herself.

"I thought you'd hate me," she said. "It was always you."

He told her he'd slept with a suspect during her long ago abduction and she imagined being the cause of the heartbreak in his eyes and forgave him with a kiss. She had stayed away from sex with Mulder because nothing he did was casual. He was all life or death, truth or consequences. In that case it had been her apparent death and his shambles of a life and she found she wasn't angry.

"You brought me root beer," he said. "I hate root beer." She started to apologize and he pressed his mouth to hers. She tasted salvation on his tongue and at the sensitive junction of his lips. "No one did that for me then," he murmured. "Only you. No one cared to bring me a sandwich but you."

"Must be fate," she said lightly.

"I love you," he said, and she wanted to believe in destiny, wanted to stay but there was Mass in the morning with her mother.

They were happy. Skinner in his elegant misery could probably smell it on them. They didn't care about conspiracy and they didn't fraternize on the clock but the weekends were their own. They went to the Smithsonian like tourists. They sat on the wharf in Baltimore and came home from the beach smelling of sunscreen. They kissed on the Metro and missed their stop.

She wasn't his first love. How could she be? He had a heart as defenseless as Belgium: women rolled right over him in three days. He had loved Phoebe and Diana, as much as it pained Scully someday. It seemed to be a self-destructive predilection of his, leggy brunettes with self-preservation instincts intact and perhaps a touch of sadism. Scully admitted her standards were high: no one unwilling to die for Mulder was good enough for him, rendered unworthy by a passion for life of his heart and the astonishing reserves of love it held.

He wasn't her first love, but he'd be her last. She was certain. They had been soldiers together, in this life and others if she believed it. Their hearts and bodies had served as battlegrounds when a broader context failed. They had lived and died for each other. There were no comparisons.

They were so ordinary as lovers and it delighted her. The sex was fantastic, but they made love the way anyone else did. They had mundane concerns about the contents of the fridge and quotidian quarrels about first use of the shower, easily resolved. They didn't talk about aliens in bed, that was one of the good things. She found his sock in her laundry. He left the toilet seat up at his apartment and that was fine with her as long as he didn't use the soap she'd put in the corner of his shower. Mulder turned out to be a genius of scrambled eggs and he seemed overjoyed to bring her breakfast when he stayed with her. She always left his apartment before dawn and she didn't know why. They talked about dinner, the weekend.

"Marry me," he said after Missouri, over the last unpopped kernels of popcorn.

"You don't want me," she said. "I'm Frankenstein's monster by now. Branched DNA, no ova, probably some undiscovered radiation mutation. You could wake up next to the new Flukeworm."

"I've never wanted anything more," he said seriously and then joked, "'Sides, I'm the one with the brain in a jar somewhere."

She touched his face. "Let's see what happens with the audit. We may be looking for jobs."

He gestured impatiently. "Then you'll marry me?"

"We'll see," she repeated. "You know I'm yours."

"I know," he said, looking troubled.

She stroked his cheek with its crossgrain of stubble. "I'm happy with you, Mulder."

He leaned into her palm.

Her life had been a labyrinth, complete with the impossibility of going back and the peace she had found at the center with Mulder. She wasn't sure about marrying him; she liked the status quo where she didn't expect him to be home for dinner, but she could sense the balance point of their lives approaching with the impending audit and the desire to be together weighed against their love of their work. They had run out of miracles and the dubious evidence of shadow men. The self-propelled engine of Mulder's massive grief had run out of fuel and the two of them were slowing down, settling in. The supernatural had gone benign.

The week before the audit was hell, shuffling through the accumulated and reaccumulated piles of their paperwork, the signed and filed aggregation of their history, and more forms to fill out to remind Accounting that those ten pages had been reduced to ash years ago in the fire, so sorry. She managed to stay the whole night with him the night before the interviews began but was in the shower when he woke and stumbled in to join her.

He quoted poetry at her through the steam, soaping her back: "truth is beauty and beauty truth" and in a wicked whisper, "My name is Ozymandius, king of kings. Look upon my work, ye mighty, and despair."

She sighed and leaned against him, the slippery ridges of her shoulder blades against the warm soapy solid mass of him. He put his arms around her, crossed under her breasts.

"I love you," he said.

"Haven't we proved ourselves by now?" she asked the showerhead. "Haven't they recognized the value of our work?"

"Scully, aliens could land on the Mall and demand free tickets to the carousel and they wouldn't admit our work has value." He nuzzled her neck under the sodden fringe of her hair. "At least I'll always know you saved the world. Maybe it's time to think of moving on. We've paid our dues."

She believed in truth, justice, and the American way, despite everything. Her gun seemed as natural an accessory as her watch. She wasn't sure what he meant by moving on. Each lost in the fog of their thoughts, they completed their mutual ablutions, mouths moving silently from time to time over fragrant slicks of clean skin. They stayed in until the water cooled. Scully pulled a suit from the travel bag she kept in Mulder's closet and left for work as he was tasting the carton of orange juice she'd brought with an air of deep suspicion.

The world skidded and listed around her. She was aware of her stillness, of her position at the dangerous center of something, and became more still, sitting at her desk with a forgotten mug of coffee cooling between her palms. Mulder arrived and paced with a sense of urgency. His restless hips and elbows threw tidy piles of paper into skew with the exaggerated heavy nonchalance of his steps. He flung himself into his chair finally and toyed with the nubby aromatic basketball he kept under his desk, strange fruit of their basement homestead.

Scully felt a fierce rush of possessiveness of the newspaper clippings Mulder had pinned to the walls in defiance of fire code and the ashy past, of her lab in the back, of this place where they'd staked their claim and stuck to it. The lighting was inadequate and she still found soot in the smudgy corners, but she and Mulder had settled this subterranean badland, pushed out the native Xerox to make a space for these files with their eerie supernal intimations. Monsters and fairies existed in the basement, immortals and magic and the strengths and fallibilities of desperate men and women. Shadow men had bugged it and burned it and banned them from it, now and then. It was womb and grave, a room full of stories. It was home.

Mulder caught her eye and let the basketball drop to the floor with a hollow rubber squeak. "Almost wish the copy machine was still down here," he said, nodding toward the cabinets. "Photographic memory isn't what it used to be."

Scully smiled, but she could feel it was as wan and unsteady as the flicker of the fluorescent lights. Here was the sum of her life on the line, neatly calculated and collated for the accounting department.

She was called. She squeezed Mulder's hand briefly and took a reluctant elevator up and up until she felt altitude sick although the Hoover Building was humble in stature and feature. Under the chill insolent apathy of the auditor's stare she felt defiance rising in her: here then, know it all, the ridiculous intimate details of what the job had wreaked on her body and life. She recited in a monotone what she had paid in contrast with remuneration received but left her heart out of it. The auditor was as intractable as Mulder with an idea, impervious to her logic and her appeal to emotion, her bowdlerized evidence. She felt the weight of their doom settling on her shoulders.

During Mulder's several interviews she went to the gym and the shooting range, seeking release. There was nothing she could fight. She felt edgy, sharp and anxious. She brought back the punctured silhouette from the firing range with three tidy holes drilled through the ostentious center of gravity: fourteen rounds there, and one rip in the shadow head. She drew an arrow to the cranial wound and annotated it in her meticulous med school handwriting with the single word "zombies" and left the poster on Mulder's desk.

She lunched alone at Cosi because Mulder always wanted to go to Potbelly's and the sandwich makers there knew them and goaded Mulder on to more and more ridiculous combinations and quantities of hot peppers. She dropped by and let them exercise their imaginations during a slow counter moment and took the experimental result back in a bag and left it on Mulder's desk with the poster. She grazed his name plate on the door with her fingertips as she went out, gave herself the afternoon off and paid an absurd price to sit in the E Street Cinema watching an arthouse film with a couple of college students and some bohemian art critic types. Afterwards she blinked in the flat humid sunlight and found Mulder had called during the cinematic time warp of the movie. She rang him back and arranged to meet him.

They did not make love that night, just lay in her bed talking in the murmurs of couples who have moved past words. His chin was pressed into her hair and her cheek lay flattened against the jut of his clavicle. And in the morning was the phone call, the full circle beckon of their beginnings. They answered in the giddy rebellious mood of the doomed or the affianced on stag night, one last fling they'd pay later.

She held Theresa's baby, pleased by the idea that someone of them had managed to put her life together in a satisfactory way, and was aware of Mulder's eyes on her. There was wonder in his face. He watched her as if in her madonna-in-chair pose she had been painted by Raphael. The usual curious ache in her womb at the sight of a child was gone. Scully felt like the first dawn and at a stoplight she kissed Mulder, just a quick brush of lips. His dusky cheekbones acquired a faint sunset flush and she thought of the rightness of their love: she was his sunrise and he was her beloved twilight, her magic-heavy heure blue and the quiet shameless night between them like a promise.

She came to him in the evening, another first. Before she had never kissed him on a case or entered his room with the spoken purpose of taking comfort from him. They had always been at ostentatious cross-purposes, listening to the hum of the other's shower through a thin wall, watching the late movie together in insomniac silence. In Kansas they had shared a bed for two nights and found their bodies gravitated toward each other. Mulder had been drawn from the gentlemanly edge of the bed to cup around her sleeping form with the sheet between them. Now the borders were redrawn: no cloth between them, no latex, no illusions or excuses or deceit.

"More than this," he said. "Scully, if you weren't in the FBI, maybe we could adopt."

"A doctor's schedule isn't stable," she said miserably. "Not the kind of doctor I am. It would have to be Quantico. Besides, Mulder, what would you do?"

"Feels like the end of the line," he mused, lips against her ear. "The Syndicate's gone, my sister's ghost has been laid to rest. There's not much to go on. How about this: for a midlife crisis, I'll settle down. We can get married so your brother stops giving me the fish-eye. If they won't let us adopt, we'll join Big Brothers/Big Sisters or pay for a poor third-world kid or something."

She rolled onto her back and looked up at him. "I love you, Mulder."

He looked happier than she'd ever seen. His luminescent joy banished the umbrageous haze in his hazel eyes and they became very green. "Scully," he said in the rough sweet way no one else  
could imitate, and he kissed her.

She had faith that night, as they passed the time with tender unhurried caresses, that they would go on forever, that things would work out. Her chills and nausea receded under Mulder's ministrations. She flattened her palm over his heart as he held her with a gentle urgency. In the faint trembling of his muscles she could feel the intensity of her love mirrored back, but the moment was soft and poignant and their embrace was not the crush of overwhelming passion.

They slept nestled peacefully together in the big rustic bed and the inexorable world went on turning around them.

The next day back in DC there was Krycek with his dark dangerous eyes and his dark dangerous news. The white row of his teeth glinted like a knife edge as he spoke and Scully remembered it was times like this that Mulder's expansive trust drove her crazy. Here was Krycek with news of a ship: the Grail, the end all. Scully looked out of the corner of her eye at Marita Covarrubias, whom she had always considered a slantwise sort of colleague, almost a friend, though they had little contact and their relations were cool and professional.

Marita caught the sideways slip of her glance and they shared a brief comprehension of their mutual position in this game designed and run by men in which they had won their way and lost regardless. They played for their own reasons but Scully suspected a significant percentage of them had to do with dark hair and a breadth of chest to rest against during the unquiet nights. After a span of years, the diplomacy of subterfuge grew stale and uncompelling.

Mulder was going, ill-advised Launcelot girding himself for one last lonely quest full-tilt at the elusive goal. She saw it in the abrupt contract of his pupils and the lightness with which he drew his fingertips across the map. She didn't want to go. She didn't trust Krycek, and while she had faith in the intentions of Skinner and the Gunmen, their knowledge was incomplete. But Mulder had that glow of focused interest about him and Scully knew Krycek knew he had Mulder and she hated Krycek in that instant. Krycek without fidelity, who slipped easily between tongues and alliances.

Mulder, she thought desperately, this is not way to make an end of things despite the beautiful symmetry of it. But he was unreceptive to the subtle shift of her beside him, too involved in the madness of schemes to pick up on her unease and lobotomized against the missives of her thoughts. She briefly cursed the implacable smoking Spender and fled the room. Mulder followed her, more attention than he would have accorded her once. She confronted him with her fears and she countered with his. He was worried for her, terrified, and she realized the change in  
him. His singletrack mind had forked and the right-hand path bore her name. She stepped into his arms mindless of cameras or organic witnesses.

"I won't let you go alone," she said. His arms tightened around her.

She drove them to the airport. Skinner stared absently out the passenger's window and Mulder in the back had his fingers twined surreptitiously in Scully's hair. In the terminal she clasped Mulder's hand with sudden blind fear. She wanted to give Skinner, who was always looking the other way, a list of directions and of Mulder's preferences, care and feeding of sorts. She felt like a soldier's wife wringing her hands in the gingham hem of a sensible apron. Skinner loped off to the ticket counter and Mulder startled her with a quick kiss. Then Mulder and Skinner were through security and gone.

His name ran through her thoughts in counterpoint to her heartbeat. Krycek and Marita had gone but she barely noticed. The Gunmen flocked to her like iron filings to a magnet and she would have been flattered by her authority if she hadn't been so distracted. Skinner's office was stuffy and she felt too warm and then she was fainting, to her embarassment. She came to cradled in Byer's suitcoated arms in an unsettling reflection of her collapse a few days before and her wakening against Mulder's chest, except that Byers' beard destroyed the illusion.

"Hey, Scully, are you all right?" asked Frohike, gruff to hide his concern.

"I'm fine," she said dazedly, narrowing her eyes at the vertiginous corner of the desk. It seemed so far away and blurred. "I'm fine. I need to go to the hospital."

The tests took an eternity. Scully sat on the edge of the bed and didn't notice she was shivering in the insufficient crackling paper gown. Her head ached. Hope was welling in her; her heart felt too small and her lungs too shallow. Mulder, she thought, and his name took all her energy, Mulder you should be here. Flu or child, you should be here. Wistfully, ironically, she wondered who would make tea for her while she communed with the toilet in the mornings. The doctor came in and told her they wanted to keep her overnight, just to check a few more things, and she let herself be tucked in by nurses.

She dreamed of Mulder but in the morning could not say what she had seen, only his upturned face blanched by sunlight as it had been on the beach. He wasn't afraid. He was thinking of her.

When they told her, she reached out for his hand, but he wasn't there.

Skinner came back with his hangdog look in place to tell her what she already knew by then. She rested her hand on her belly with its miracle burden. She would find him: her tenacious heart disregarded the laws of time and space, and found that no nuclear force could match love.

Mulder in the stars was calling to her.


End file.
